"Negative" work blogging can be good for employers

I've just come across a paper that suggests employee who post negative comments about their employer can lead to positive outcomes.

There is a catch of course in that the ratio of "negative" postings to more positive postings should not generally exceed 15 to 20 per cent.

For more information about this paper - Blog, Blogger, and the Firm: Can Negative Posts by Employees Lead to Positive Outcomes? by Rohit Aggarwal - click here.

New research paper on employee blogging

I've just come across a paper published earlier this year on employee blogging.

General details can be found here.

Some details of the study (provided by Business Wire):

The authors looked at bloggers in Fortune 500 IT consulting and services companies that permitted both leisure- and work-related blogging, and studied work environments where the company prohibits leisurely blogging.

They found that when organizations put restrictions on leisure blogging, online work-related knowledge sharing decreases.

The authors believe this happens because creating social media content at work not only helps employees to educate those seeking information, but also helps them build social relationships in the workplace.

An employee can attract fellow employees to his blog with an entertaining or leisure post and, because work-related posts are on the same page, there is a spillover effect with people reading work-related articles.

The actual paper can be found here: A Structural Model of Employee Behavioral Dynamics in Enterprise Social Media by Yan Huang, Param Vir Singh and Anindya Ghose.

Work-related blogs in the FT

I've just come across an article that is about work-related/employee blogs in the Financial Times.

There is some confusion between blogs encouraged by employers that don't work out as planned and blogs that are started independently by employees, on their own time and using their own resources, that also end up in the headlines.

It doesn't tell us anything new, but it's nice to know that employe blogging activities continue to grab the attention of the media.

For more details see Cyber musings on the office are a risky strategy by Rhymer Rigby.

Another doctor of work blogging

Late last year I blogged about Abigail Schoneboom who did a PhD on the subject of work blogging - see here.

Just today (via Google alerts) I heard of another PhD on the subject of work blogging.

It's by Lilia Efimova.

However, this PhD looks at work blogging in quite a different way than Abigail or myself, i.e. workers using blog to express passion, rather than frustration with employment.

Click here for a summary of Lilia's work.

To view a copy of the whole piece of work - Passion at work: Blogging practices of knowledge work - click here.

The spy who blogged about it...

According to the BBC News Web-site, the Israeli secret service has launched a new venture: it has started to carry an Internet diary, or blog, written by four of its agents.

More details:

The agents discuss how they were recruited, and what sort of work they perform; they also answer questions sent in by members of the public.

The main aim, it seems, is recruitment:

The blogs are intended to draw members of the public into other areas of the Shin Bet website - in particular the recruitment section.

For more details see Israel's Shin Bet launches blog by Tim Franks.

Walmart starts blogging

Thanks to the wonder of news alerts I have fairly easy access to stories on blogs from around the world.

This morning I got a story delivered to my inbox, from The New York Times, about Walmart letting some employees blog on work time.

The NYT describes this new development as:

The result is an intensely personal window into the lives, preferences and quirks of the powerful tastemakers at Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, who have spent years shielded from public view.

This, apparently, isn't the first time that Walmart has 'plunged' into the blogosphere in this fashion (details in the article).

Instead, it seems, Walmart are only allowing limited and a particular type of employee to blog - merchandise managers.

Still, it's an interesting development, and if Walmart see success in this, you can bet your last dollar that many other will follow soon.

Go see Wal-Mart Tastemakers Write Unfiltered Blog by Michael Barbaro for more details.

New research paper on employee use of Web 2.0 communication technology

I've just finished a rough draft of a paper I will presenting at a conference later this week.

I'm making it available on my blog in the hope that it some might read it and offer me their opinions on my ideas.

The paper is similar to the one I wrote earlier this year on work blogging, which went through a similar reviewing process, and is now being reviewed for an academic journal.

In as few words as possible, the paper is about employees increasingly pursuing their employment-related interests through Web 2.0 communication technology, e.g. career development and job search, e-activism, e-misbehaviour, and when at work doing what workers are supposed to do!

It is called - Workers are doing it for themselves: Examining creative employee application of Web 2.0 communication technology - and available for download here.

The abstract of the paper is as follows:

The paper should be of interest to academics, trade unionists, employers and governmental officials who have an interest in new forms of Web communication technology and how new Web communication technologies may affect the future direction of industrial relations.

The main foci of the paper is Web 2.0, or the recent transformation of the World-Wide-Web to allow ordinary people to get involved in creating on-line content (e.g. blogs, wikis and social networking platforms), and, increasing evidence that non-organized workers are applying this new wave of communication technologies for work and employment-related ends.

It is put forward that non-organized workers are progressively making more use of such technology as a means to develop their careers, take action against employers, and, as a mean to misbehave and survive work.

The method applied to assess the proposed trends involves reviewing scholarly research, anecdotal accounts of worker activity from newspapers, and observations of Internet activity noted by the author of the paper.

The conclusions suggest there is superficial, yet strong evidence to suggest workers are increasingly experimenting and being highly creative with Web 2.0 communication technology, for a range of work and employment-related ends.

Due to the newness of the technology, however, the results generate far more unknowns than answers.

Guidance for future research activities are summarised in the conclusions.

Like I said before, the this is an early draft and will probably be modified several times once the many reviewing processes take place.

Emerging blogging practices in organizations

I just came across a rather interesting in-depth case study research paper that is based on employee blogging at Microsoft.

It charts the development of employee blogging since its inception several years ago.

The abstract is as follows:

Editors, email, and instant messaging were first widely used by students who later brought knowledge of their uses and effective practices into workplaces.

Weblogs may make such a transition more quickly. We present a study of emergent blogging practices in a corporate setting.

We attended meetings, read email, documents, and Weblogs, and interviewed 38 people loggers, infrastructure administrators, attorneys, public relations specialists, and executives.

We found an experimental, rapidly-evolving terrain marked by growing sophistication about balancing personal, team, and corporate incentives and issues.

See how employee blogs work for Microsoft by downloading Lilia Efimova and Johnathan Grudin's paper - Crossing Boundaries: A Case Study of Employee Blogging - here.

Of similar interest is a newspaper article written about employee blogs by Marley Obi of the Scotsman - Employers bring blogs in from dark.

So is a book on virtual teamworking initiatives and blogs, wikis, etc. that I spotted on Amazon the other day.

Businesses and blogging

I try and keep the focus of this blog on subjects related to work and how workers are increasingly using Web 2.0 in a creative and purposeful fashion (well, most of the time!).

However, once in a while, I come across stuff on corporate blogs that grabs my attention.

In this instance it is a paper called Blogs and businesses: Opportunities and headaches by Wallace Wood, Robert Behling and Susan Haugen.

The abstract says more than I could say in such a short space:

"Web logs, commonly called blogs were originally developed and used by individuals.

This paper focuses on blogs from the point of view of businesses.

Current professional literature on blogging was examined to determine how blogs are being used, who uses them, and what are their advantages/disadvantages.

A survey of full time working students in southern New England was conducted to collect primary data on the corporate use of blogs to compare with the result of the literature search."

A good straightforward introduction to corporate blogs (in this case external and internal blogs), which has many similarities to work blogs.

Employee blogs

Googling around the other day I came across a research project that looks at employee blogs - where blogging is encouraged by the employer as a means to organize employee knowledge and for certain employees there is the chance to communicate directly with customers and other third parties.

The project is called ICEBERG and run by Lilia Efimova.

It focuses on blogging at knowledge-intensive environments and aims to describe blogging practices of knowledge workers, as well as implications for introducing/using weblogs in business contexts.

A range of articles has come from the project, which can be viewed here.